http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article02181002.aspx
Idle Chatter
Postmodern Man
The second generation is here, and boy does it feel right.
By Morgan Meis
It's been more than 30 years since Jean-François Lyotard closed the historical door on Modernism.
It was 1979, to be exact, when Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Rumors of the death of Modernism had been swirling for years. But death comes in stages, especially when the mortally wounded is a "movement" or an "age." Lyotard's book managed to tie all those rumors together and then package the result as "Postmodernism," the new next thing.
Lyotard focused on the idea of narratives. Past periods, Modernism in particular, had been fond of what he called "meta-narratives," all-inclusive narrative frameworks that explained everything, more or less.
Think, for instance, of Marxism and the way that class struggle drives every other part of the story. Look at the objects around you, the way you're dressed, current politics, movements in the arts. Strip away the details, any good Marxist will tell you, and lurking beneath you will find the class struggle.
That bottle of water you're drinking is, in its essence, a natural resource owned by someone who then employs laborers hiring themselves out to work at a price determined by the market. This central relationship between wage-earners and owners of the means of production determines political structures, ideas on morality, even the dynamics of the family. For the Marxist, class struggle is the meta-narrative overarching all the other stories that fit inside. (((I really like big theoretical constructs based on guzzling bottles of stuff, as readers of SHAPING THINGS may recall.)))
Lyotard called the new age Postmodern because he thought that such meta-narratives no longer captured the complexity of late-20th-century existence. The fragmentation of identity brought about by modernization and globalization was too profound. At best, any narrative was going to tell only a small part of the story. Meta-narratives had blown apart into an endless chaos of micro-narratives. ((("Long Tail," anyone? What goes around comes around.)))
All of this probably sounds roughly plausible, if not downright obvious. (((Yup. Unless you're a fundamentalist Christian born since 1979, in which case you've never heard of Lyotard because you were way too busy reading the Old Testament and buying handguns. Actually, contemporary Fundie Christians 2.0 are Oath Keeper guys, who now do nothing but fundie textual glosses on the Constitution. Hey, if blinkered, aggressive denial is good enough for religion, it's good enough for the law! And what about the forthcoming Fundie 3.0? Fundie operating systems. Don't say I didn't warn ya.)))
The only real difficulty comes in listening to Lyotard himself talking about Postmodernism:
"The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable." (((In French, that's a thing of beauty.)))
Need I even take the time to point out how old-fashioned-sounding are these sentences from Mr. Lyotard? They're like a parody of hip academic prose. As turgid as anything written by a Modernist thinker, they manage also to be pointlessly obscure. (((Not only are they pointfully obscure sentences – as a sci-fi writer, I'm very keen on transgressively tactless unpresentables. Stock in trade, really. I got basketfulls of those oxymorons.)))
This fascination with "putting forward the unpresentable in presentation itself" was a bugbear amongst French theorists of all stripes in the ’70s. America had Five Easy Pieces; the French had Maurice Blanchot and the insight that, "To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking — and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it."
That kind of jargon-madness was shared by many in the first generation of Postmodernity, French and non-French alike. They were like Modernists unhinged. They wanted to gallop off into the absolute freedom of their micro-narratives but they'd all been raised on the heavy gruel of Modernist cant. Those fattened bellies could never get off the ground. (((Okay, to be just, you can say a lot of things about the prose of Jean Baudrillard, but "fattened belly" isn't one of 'em.)))
Lyotard followed up The Postmodern Condition with The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, in which he attempted to answer the crucial question, "How can the reality of the referent be subordinated to the effectuation of verification procedures, or even to the instructions that allow anyone who so wishes to effectuate those procedures?" The answer, of course, is, "It can't."
Luckily for the rest of us, it turns out that it doesn't matter. But it has taken 30 years or so to become fully confident about that fact. (((Okey-doke. The mills of the Academy grind pretty slow, but at least they grind.))) Only now, after living in the Postmodern condition for a full generation, have we stopped worrying about the reality of the referent and moved on to the simple act of referring. (((Well, that's some progress, right? Sometimes you just have to wait for 'em to die off in droves.)))
(((Sometimes people seem to forget that these postmodern gurus were language philosophers. Expecting them to knock it off with the ontology is like telling a barber to forget all about hair.)))
This has taken a fair bit of learning: learning how to be, how to talk, how to think again. It has meant, at the very least, developing a new language, a new style. That style ought to personify much of what Lyotard was talking about while dropping his way of talking about it. (((Applied, pragmatic Lyotard without the philosophy. America's gift to the world.)))
It also means giving up the theoretical worries. Lyotard was always twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels trying to prove to the Modernist that Postmodernism is real. Second-generation Postmodernists are perfectly, perhaps painfully aware that Postmodernism is real. (((Gotta like that part, too.)))
They want to know how to live in that reality, how to grasp it.
This brings us, finally, to David Shields' new book, Reality Hunger. It is a book of fragmentary thoughts and insights numbered 1 to 617 and divided into chapters with titles like "books for people who find television too slow."
(((Why isn't it a weblog, one wonders. Maybe it is. Let's check. How about a little gadget-peon Marxist class oppression there, Google? Yup. It IS a weblog.)))
http://www.davidshields.com/blog/page2
Shields calls it "A Manifesto." That's a little in-joke on his part since there couldn't be anything more Modernist than a manifesto, what with all the high-sounding pronouncements and meta-narratives kicking about. But Shields has written a 21st-century Manifesto, a manifesto in the minor key that follows the tone of one of the opening quotes by Graham Greene, "When we are not sure, we are alive." That aliveness and not-sureness are what Shields means by reality. It is that for which he hungers.
The first generation of postmodernists, Baudrillard for instance, were constantly at pains to show us that the new reality was manufactured and therefore, in a funny sense, not really real. Baudrillard called it the simulacrum. Reality had become simulation all the way through. To look for the underlying reality on which the simulation was based was to miss the point. Second-generation Postmodernists like Shields find such concerns boring. Here is Shields talking about what he calls the "American reality":
It stupefies, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one's own meager imagination. The actuality is constantly outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist. (((Well, yeah, if you envy guys who write novels about bankrupt Creationist Babbitts on steroids.)))
Notice the subtle but profound shift in attitude. We have gone from worrying whether there is any reality at all to being overwhelmed by the sheer immensity of the reality we face.
(((I dunno. This Shields guy doesn't look particularly "overwhelmed by reality" to me. Check this out:)))
"Biography
"David Shields’s new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is being published by Knopf on February 23, 2010. His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. He is the author of eight other books, including Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
"Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina. His work has been translated into a dozen languages."
(((That look-and-feel like an "overwhelmed" guy to you? Me neither. {bookmarks website})))
Shields is impatient simply to get out there into the swirling mess of the world. (((Maybe he lives there in the world instead of just analyzing it; you never know.))) He dismisses the fumbly navel gazing of first-generation Postmodernists with a wave of the hand. "Don't waste your time," he says, "get to the real thing. Sure, what's 'real'? Still, try to get to it."
Taking up the insights of Andy Warhol (a second-generation Postmodernist born far ahead of his time), Shields says, "Marilyn and Elvis are just as much a part of the natural world as the ocean and a Greek God are." That is the terrain of the new natural, the new reality. Shields defines it in one succinct line: "There's nothing and everything going on." (((Well, the oceans predate and postdate humanity while Marilyn, Elvis and a Greek God are verbal persiflage, but that's okay, this is postmodernism, let 'em have a few category errors.)))
These are some of the claims Shields makes in Reality Hunger...
(((More. Expect to hear LOTS more.)))
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/reality-hunger-david-shields-review
